The VFX of Battle: Los Angeles

Los Angeles is doomed in the upcoming film “Battle: Los Angeles”.  Aliens, marines, helicopters, and spaceships were all on tap for the new film, and CGSociety has an interview up with Cinesite’s Ben Shepherd on how they brought it to life.

The aftermath of a battle on Santa Monica Pier, and the ongoing ground battle with the aliens pushing forward was another sequence Cinesite had their work cut out on. The sequence where the aliens landed served up the giant rings of smoke. This was the way the meteors containing aliens were shown landing at the Santa Monica beach. These were all done with Maya Fluids. “We wrote our own proprietary renderer which solved the problem of gathering the best rate for creating this,” explains Shepherd. “We added extra frequency detail, so we could do a lo-rez render on the inital run, then you break it up on the farms to add more detail.”

CGSociety – Battle: Los Angeles.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .